Association of whole body motion from tool knowledge for humanoid robots

Since humanoid robots have similar body structures to humans, they are expected to perform various tasks including tool-use manipulation tasks instead of humans. This research studies on learning and performing tool-use manipulation tasks. For tool-use manipulations, understanding the relation between tool motion and whole body motion is crucial. In this paper, a tool-use motion model is designed with tool knowledge and body motion knowledge. The authors propose a method which enables a humanoid robot to associate whole body motion from tool knowledge by adopting the mimesis method from partial observations. When a specific tool trajectory of a tool-use motion is given, appropriate hand motion is associated. From the calculated hand motion, appropriate whole body motion is associated successively. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a humanoid robot.